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• Elona Hartjes, Ontario Certified Teacher

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Kathy at Creating Passionate Users asked the question “Are our tools making us dumber”. I wanted to scream YES THEY ARE. YES THEY ARE. YES THEY ARE. Kathy’s graph says it all.(I love her graphs)

Calculators are making students dumber. How do I know this? Recently, one of my grade nine students was using her calculator to calculate 3 x 6. That’s not the first time nor the first student that did that kind of thing. I had to restrain myself from ripping my calculator (she borrowed my calculator, because she had forgotten hers) out of her hands. Talk about adding insult to injury. I told her, ” Don’t you know you loose brain cells everytime you use your calculator to do simple math. Don’t you know that if you don’t use your math brain cells you’ll loose them. (I have a video called Inside The Teenage Brain from PBS that says if you don’t use specific brain cells, you’ll lose them. Honest, here’s the link.)

Last summer when I taught grade ten math at Camp I Can, I showed the kids how to do long division the old fashioned way, without a calculator. They were amazed. It was as if I had taught them a magic trick using chalk and a blackboard. They kept asking for more questions. It’s amazing to see how pleased they were that they could do math the old fashioned way. They were having fun doing long division- go figure. I gave them my brain cell speech too.

I really don’t know why kids use calculators for simple math. I guess maybe an elementary teacher could tell me. Now I’m a special education teacher, and I know all about short term memory and all that. But why could they learn to do long division in Camp I Can in grade 10 and not in earlier grades. It may be that they just have gaps in their knowledge. At-risk kids can have a few attendance issues. They skip a class or two or 89 of them.

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  These are my personal views and not those of my employer.